Clues narrow mystery of lost airman’s identity

Clues narrow mystery of lost airman’s identity
by Audrey McAvoy and Juliana Barbassa

The airman’s possessions, laid out on a table in a military lab, offer a glimpse of America circa 1942: a fountain pen, a black plastic comb, three badly damaged address books and 51 cents in dimes, nickels and pennies.

A neatly handwritten note tucked into one of the address books reveals the words “all the girls know,” but the rest is deteriorated and illegible.

Forensic scientists in a military lab at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii are using these and other clues to help them identify a World War II airman whose remarkably well-preserved body was chipped out of a California glacier last month after two mountain climbers discovered his head and arm jutting out of the ice.

The airman is believed to have been one of four men aboard a navigational training flight that crashed after takeoff from a Sacramento airfield on Nov. 18, 1942. Leo M. Mustonen, 22, of Brainerd, Minn., was on the plane.

Experts were able to read a name on a faded badge on the serviceman’s clothing, but they won’t reveal it until they confirm the identity through DNA. It could take weeks, or months but that’s not long for family members who waited for decades…

Investigators might have eliminated two of the trainees as possibilities. The existence of the nametag and a comment from one of the airman’s relatives appear to indicate that the body is that of either Mustonen or the pilot, 2nd Lt. William A. Gamber, 23, of Fayette, Ohio.

Five years after the plane vanished, ice climbers scaling the 60-degree slope of the Mount Darwin glacier found the first hard evidence of the crash: pieces of the motor, scattered shoes, clothing and a piece of frozen flesh.

Among them was a badge with the name of John Mortenson, 25, of Moscow, Idaho. That appears to eliminate him as the frozen airman because the uniform on the remains also bore a nametag.

A sister of missing airman Ernest Munn, 23, of St. Clairsville, Ohio, said a military official called her in early November, dashing her hopes that the body could be her brother’s remains.

“They told us they didn’t think it was him,” said Lois Shriver, Munn’s sister.

That leaves only Gamber and Mustonen, the youngest son of Finnish immigrants.

The experts have spent the past few weeks examining his bones, taking DNA samples and studying his teeth to establish who he was and precisely how he died.

“We want to be able to understand what happened to him fully,” said Robert Mann, deputy scientific director of the lab identifying the remains. “And we also want to be able to answer whatever questions the family may have about ‘exactly what happened to my son, my brother.”

The POW/MIA Accounting Command has recovered and examined the remains of U.S. servicemen all around the world, but skeletons usually are all that is left. In this case, the deep cold preserved the airman’s flesh and hair, as well as his clothing.

So far they have determined the airman was in his early 20s and stood between 5 feet, 9 inches and 6 feet, 2 inches. He had light brown or sandy blond hair. X-rays showed many of his bones were broken. He wore an unopened parachute, a thermal undershirt under his uniform and a sweater.

The discovery of the airman’s body Oct. 16 in the Sierra Nevada created a sensation. Families of the men who perished on the flight called the Fresno County Coroner’s office to see if he was their lost loved one.

“We’re just lucky that somebody walked by there when there was a thaw and his body was exposed,” Mann said. “If not, he could have stayed there for hundreds of thousands of years.

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